Didier Faustino

Architect
(1968)

Didier Faustino’s architectural and artistic practice is defined first and foremost by the multiplicity of approaches he uses to experiment with the complex interactions between the body and space. Projects for housing, videos, performances, installations, industrial design, set design, writing and lectures are all ways enabling him to act and get others to react. Using productions that shun any sort of conformist solution, he proposes more radical and troubling answers, each provoking the “visual and physical instability of the user’s perception of space. Faustino integrates “dysfunction as a tool for creating space,” not defining architecture by its geometric components but rather its sensitive ones. For him, architecture is born by experimenting with it and taking risks, and it must kindle in the user an authentic awareness “of being inside architecture.” An active interface between the body and the environment in which it is placed, architecture is intended to elicit thinking about temporality, desire, ambiguity, eroticism, discovery, the unexpected, the random, and the degradable. Faustino’s creations–the Liaisons Dangereuses set of furniture, the cultural center La Capitainerie in Lyon, a teahouse in Korea, the Seroussi Pavilion, the Mobile River Development Unit for the Docks in Lyon and the Concrete Island designed for a competition for the Navigable Waterways of France–all express the permanent dialog he sets up between art and architecture while also demonstrating how spaces, buildings and objects are interfaces between the individual and the collective.

A graduate of the École d’architecture de Paris Villemin (1995), Didier Fiuza Faustino (1968) founded the Laboratoire d’Architectures Performances et Sabotages (LAPS) in Paris in 1996. He went on to launch the multi-disciplinary studio Le Fauteuil Vert in 1997, and in Lisbon in 1998, Numero, a magazine on aesthetics. With Pascal Mazoyer he founded the Bureau des Mésarchitectures in Paris in 2001. Faustino’s firm won the 2001-2002 Nouveaux Albums des Jeunes Architectes. He also won the “Premio Tabaqueira” contemporary art prize in Lisbon in 2001 and has since participated as an artist, architect or exhibition curator in many events in France and abroad. In 2009, he took part in the creation of EVENTO (Bordeaux’s art biennial) serving as chief curator.